Determining the environmental impacts of conventional and alternatively fuelled vehicles through LCA

Authors: Nikolas Hill, Sofia Amaral, Samantha Morgan-Price, Tom Nokes, Judith Bates, Hinrich Helms, Horst Fehrenbach, Kirsten Biemann, Nabil Abdalla, Julius Jöhrens, Eloise Cotton, Lizzie German, Anisha Harris, Sabine Ziem-Milojevic, Sebastien Haye, Chris Sim, Ausilio Bauen

Transport is an important contributor to several environmental issues, including air pollution and climate change. The EU has set challenging objectives for tackling these. To help support decision making on mitigating actions in the transport sector it is paramount to develop a better understanding of the environmental impacts of road vehicles over their entire lifecycle. This report summarises a range of vehicle life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies available in the public domain, which were found to be of varying focus, data quality, detail and coverage. It develops a policymaker-oriented LCA methodology for light- and heavy-duty vehicles covering a selection of major powertrain types and fuel chains for the 2020 to 2050 timeframe. The study has combined state-of-the art vehicle LCA with novel methodological choices to develop results for a range of environmental impacts for 14 electricity chains, 60 fuel chains, and 65 generic vehicle/powertrain combinations across 7 vehicle types. It has also provided several suggestions for policy-makers, based on these results, especially recommendations for future LCA research.